At ConSec headquarters, a scientist named Dr. That man is named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) and he is soon captured by agents of a private military company called ConSec. Scanners takes place in the near future and opens in a shopping mall food court, where a woman is struck by an unexplained seizure after she is caught staring at a homeless man. Someone says to you, ‘Not only are you not weak, you are stronger than you ever imagined’ - that’s one of the premises of the film, though it doesn’t come out exactly that way.” You go to sleep weak, and wake up finding that, in fact, you are strong. “What does lay behind the film is a fantasy, I think a very powerful one, that I suppose starts as a child’s fantasy. “Those dynamics are not what make it work, in fact they’re almost not there at all,” he said. The idea of humans evolving into telepaths ending up as the seed of two more scripts that Cronenberg wrote, titled The Sensitives and Telepathy 2000, both of which eventually morphed into Scanners.Ĭronenberg admitted to Fangoria that Scanners was “quite different” from his previous films and their obsessions with psychosexuality and bodily mutation. That film was set in a bizarre institute where sexual experimentation was used to develop the telepathic powers of a group of subjects. The origin of Scanners goes back to Cronenberg’s earliest days as a filmmaker and his 1969 directorial debut, Stereo. That meant a lot of things weren’t together.” And I had only written one first-draft script, which took me three weeks to write. “Very hard, very long hours…It was also very demanding because we had so little pre-production time, it was my biggest budget, my longest shoot - it turned out to be about nine weeks - but I only had about two weeks for all the pre-production, which is ridiculous.
“It was physically exhausting,” Cronenberg told Fangoria magazine in a 1981 feature.
and the first Canadian film to hit the top spot.ĭespite its modest success - which opened the door for future Cronenberg classics like Videodrome, The Dead Zone and his masterpiece, The Fly - Scanners was a difficult film for the director to make.
#Scannerz movie movie#
Scanners briefly topped the Varietybox office chart the week it opened, making it Cronenberg’s first Number One movie in the U.S.
Released 40 years ago on January 14, 1981, Scanners was a turning point for Cronenberg in many ways: it edged away from the sexually tinged “body horror” of his first few films and into the realms of sci-fi, action, and conspiracy thriller, while adding advanced visual effects and an overall polish to the director’s clinical esthetic.Īlthough none of his films up to that point had achieved any sort of mainstream success outside Canada, Scanners was a breakthrough for Cronenberg: his most expensive film to date (with a budget of $4 million), it was his first to also earn decent money in the lucrative North American market. Scanners was the fifth commercially released feature film (and seventh overall) directed by David Cronenberg, the independent Canadian auteur who initially made a name for himself as a director of visceral, provocative horror films such as Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood. This article contains spoilers for the ending of Scanners.
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